We met in the fall of 2017. I was working as the media coordinator for a college gap year program at Hume Lake called Joshua Wilderness Institute and she was a student. Woops haha. During the year I noticed that she was super passionate about Jesus and was very loved by her friends. It made sense to me why a lot of the guys had crushes on her, but I 100% assumed nothing even close to romantic would ever happen between us and kept my distance. Turns out she didn't notice me at all during that year and so we barely interacted haha. After that year we talked briefly as peers that often happened to end up at the same climbing crag, and then we went our separate ways. A year later, in the fall of 2019, our lives crossed again when she came back to Hume to work on the Outdoor Education team. We found ourselves together often, surrounded by mutual friends, and started to really notice potential between us. Alyssa being Alyssa, she pulled me aside eventually and asked "so what is going on with us?". We took some time to get to know each other outside of the friend group and then started officially dating once I asked her to be my girlfriend on top of Yosemite falls. Our year of dating had it's ups and downs for sure, like going on awesome climbing adventures together but also spending a lot of time long distance. The biggest curveball was with Covid-19. We weren't able to see each other for a few months, which was super hard, but then I got to surprise her at her door and tell her I loved her for the first time. Soon after that I purchased a ring. During her family trip to lake tahoe, on her birthday, I got down on one knee and proposed. It's been an incredible journey so far, and we're both so excited to live life together from now on. This is all from my perceptive, cus we all know if Alyssa wrote this section you'd be reading a novel lol.